Category Archives: Iraq

Carroll's Lessons in Captivity

Iraq

Jill Carroll spent 82 days in the captivity of Iraqi insurgents, after which she was miraculously released. She has been documenting the nightmare online at the Christian Science Monitor. This once-naïve American young woman will not be putting herself in such a predicament anytime soon.

One of the observations she shares in her reports is that the “movement … included children and mothers, whole families who exhibited ardent devotion to their brand of Islam – and to chilling brutality.â€? (Ignore the CSM’s politically correct obeisance to the idea that the bad guys have hijacked, rather than heeded, Islam.)
Carroll relates how her captor boasted that his wife, Um Ali (mother Ali), pregnant with her fourth child, wanted to become a suicide bomber. “Later I was told,� writes Carroll, “that this was the only way women could be part of the mujahideen [sic]. The men could have the glory of fighting in battle. Women got to blow themselves up.�

As the evening progressed, and as she joined the women in picking at the food scraps the men had magnanimously tossed them after they feasted royally–she also discovered that the women (only under hijacked Islam, of course) don’t get to eat much.
Nor do seventy Chippendale dancers await them in hell, after “martyrdom.�

In Politics, Rubbish Rises to the Top

Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, Politics

When Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, piously pontificates that the actions of the Israeli government are for the benefit of the Lebanese people (of which, in his atomistic mind, Hezbollah is not a part), and aimed at “freeing them of the cancer of Hezbollah,” I feel bilious.

It’s the same sickness rising one gets when Genghis Bush promotes his actions in Iraq as of benefit to the Iraqi people, a million of whom are now impoverished, displaced, aid-dependent refugees in their own country.

If these pols are such populists and democrats, why did they not let the beneficiaries of their humanitarian humbugs vote to accept or reject their ‘good deeds’? Why not ask the people you are supposedly helping if they want your liberating bombs? Or is this ‘charity’ compulsory?

I’d disrespect Gillerman less if he cut the treacle, and said, “We hate what we’ve become, but we have no option but to kill more innocents than guilty?

Israel in Lebanon is coming across in a worse light than is America in Iraq, even though the reverse is true. The first incursion, as bad as it is, was a response to provocation; the last, nothing of the sort. Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11 and Saddam and Osama never sat in a tree kissing.

But so stupid are the Israelis that they keep commandeering the American rhetoric with respect to Iraq to justify their actions. I guess their thinking goes something along the lines of, “Iraq: hmm, that went well, so let’s take that ‘experience’ and its language and put it to work for us Lebanon.”

War-Withdrawal Syndrome (WWS)

Democracy, Iraq, Neoconservatism, War

Neoconservatives are suffering from War-Withdrawal Syndrome (I just made that up; it’s not yet in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). We haven’t launched one in quite a while and they’re growing restless watching Israel steal their thunder. “Where is our cowboy president,” they’ve been groaning lately.

The main complaint assorted Beltway types make is that the President hasn’t been sticking his nose as much into affairs not his or ours. Come to think of it, that’s not entirely true. The other day I was watching news while on the awful elliptical at the gym (were it not necessary to cross train to keep strong for outdoor running, you’d never catch me in the place), when I almost fell off laughing.

With Putin at his side, Bush launched into a lecture—albeit a watered-down one—about democracy. Then he stepped into the doggie doo-doo of Democracies: Iraq. To illustrate his “point,” he mentioned the wonders of that “democracy” (minus the 150 people plus dead daily). Putin shot back as quick as a whip: “I would not wish for a democracy such as Iraq’s.”

In any case, WWS is easily cured. For neocons expressing a yen for war and framing any lack of aggression as appeasement, I recommend special camps. Ship—em over to Iraq, for a couple of months (as needed) in the war zone.

Auster Angry

Iraq, The Zeitgeist, War, WMD

Lawrence Auster has requested that I print the following:

Ilana,

I think you were out of line the other day when you referred to me as an “apologist” for the Iraq war. To call someone an “apologist” implies he is completely on board with something and is committed to defending it no matter what. To call me an “apologist” implies that I was acting out of partisanship or emotional identification and that I didn’t have a reasoned and critical basis for what I have argued over and over, which was (1) that we had reasons to believe that Iraq, a rogue regime, had WMDs, and (2) that given the existence of terror groups who would like to cause infinite damage to us if they could, we could not permit the Iraqi regime to continue in possession of, and continue developing further capacities in, WMDs which might be transferred to those terrorist groups. I also said prior to the war that I saw terrible things coming out of the war, but that I couldn’t see a way to avoid the logic summarized above that made the war necessary. That’s not being an apologist. That’s having a reasoned, and very reluctant, argument.

You could have described me as a person who supported the invasion for the reasons I have given. Given the huge number of criticisms and doubts I expressed about the war effort from many months before the war to the present moment, particularly my opposition to waging a war for the purpose of spreading democracy, for you to come out and call me simply an “apologist” for the war, period, as though I were an all-out champion of the administration in the manner of a Hugh Hewitt or a Rush Limbaugh, was not true or fair.

Lawrence Auster

Auster is definitely no Hannity, Hewitt or Limbaugh. If I gave that impression, it was unintended. However, because Mr. Auster’s “reasoned” position was palpably and patently flawed, violating objective reality, natural and international law, and the Constitution—he ought not to have held it. Iraq, in those good old days, was an economically desperate, secular dictatorship, profoundly at odds with Islamic fundamentalism. At the time of the invasion, it had acquiesced to inspectors (was in fact being criss-crossed by teams of them), hadn’t any ties to al-Qaeda or a hand in Sept. 11. It was a Third-World nation, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the gulf war. Iraq had no navy or air force. It was no threat to American national security. —ILANA